IBM and its chip development partners announced today that they've developed the first functional 22nm silicon fabricated SRAM cell. This puts them ahead of Intel, which had announced its technological entry into the 32 nm domain in September, 2007. SRAM is usually the first semiconductor device a chip-maker tests a new fabrication-process on, before working on microprocessors. These devices were developed and manufactured by AMD, Freescale, IBM STMicroelectronics, Toshiba and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE). They were built in the conventional 6-transistor design and on a 300 mm wafer. This level of miniaturization made the SRAM cell shrink to a mere 0.1 sq. μm, compare this to the SRAM cells that go into making caches on the 45 nm Intel processors, 0.346 sq. μm.

22 nm chips are two generations into the future, and AMD is yet to catch up with Intel in commercially available 45 nm silicon fabricated CPUs. Intel on the other hand has demonstrated 32 nm fabrication last year and would probably show off its 32 nm CPU prototypes at the IDF this week.

Intel has responded to this development saying that while it indeed is an entry into the 22 nm domain by IBM and its partners, merely producing a SRAM cell doesn't validate that, it is merely an exercise in lithography scaling. The technology can be validated only when they come up with SRAM arrays of any given density like Intel did back in September when it announced its 32nm conquest. Demonstrating a single cell doesn't represent reality, where SRAM occurs as arrays and not single cells. The 32 nm array Intel demonstrated had 290 million cells.

An SRAM array (of a said size (that goes into making the CPU cache)) is made of SRAM cells. Each cell holds a small bit of information.

Intel says: "you just shrunk a SRAM cell into 22 nm, it's just like using a crayon to write really fine (by sharpening it). You still have to prove you opened a can of 22nm by building and demonstrating a stable array using those cells like we did back in September. We shot our mouths only after making sure the thing actually worked at 32nm."

OOF. This is unexpected; I think a majority of people expected intel to come up with this first. Even if its not polished and feasible, IBM DOES work with AMD therefore, R&D should not take that long

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Did't IBM & AMD announce another milestone along these lines a few months back? Also from what I gathered back then was that Intel was still dealing with logistics problems that were keeping them from getting the tools they needed to perform some R&D on sub 32nm processes. I'm not sure if they're still dealing with that but I wasn't too surprised by this.

What will remain to be seen is how this edge will translate down the road for AMD's operations (Will they catch up to Intel, pass them, keep the edge but still get beat? etc.)